The Complete Guide to Deleting Items on an iPhone

Using an iPhone can become a balancing act as you start to take advantage of all of the features that the device offers. There are so many functions that it can serve that you will frequently find yourself in a situation where you need to delete items with large file sizes in order to make room for something new. You can delete almost anything from your iPhone, although the method for doing so might not always be obvious. So we have put together this handy guide to enable you to delete almost any kind of item from your iPhone in order to free up some space for a new app or a movie. Note that the methods outlined below are for an iPhone that is using iOS 7.

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Deleting Songs

This method is for deleting individual songs from your iPhone. For a more thorough explanation, you can read our article here.

Step 1: Open the Music app.

Step 2: Select the Songs option at the bottom of the screen.

Step 3: Swipe from right to left on the song you want to delete, then touch the Delete button.

You will notice that there is a cloud icon to the right of some of the songs. These are songs that are in the cloud, and are not currently taking up space on your phone, so they cannot be deleted using the method above. You can learn how to stop showing all music here if you don’t want these songs to appear in the app.

Deleting Emails

This method will allow you to delete emails that are actually stored on your iPhone, which is a feature of POP3 email. IMAP email services, such as Gmail, will only give you the option of archiving emails instead of deleting them. For a more detailed explanation, you can read our article here.

Step 1: Open the Mail app.

Step 2: Select the Inbox containing the email you want to delete.

Step 3: Touch the Edit button at the top-right of the screen.

Step 4: Touch the circle to the left of the email you want to delete, then touch the Trash button at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Step 1: Touch and hold the icon of the app that you want to delete until all of the apps on the screen start to shake.

Step 2: Touch the small x at the top-left corner of the icon.

Step 3: Touch the Delete button to confirm that you want to delete the app and all of its’ data.

You can read this article for a more detailed explanation of deleting apps on the iPhone.

Deleting Notes

The Notes app is a great way to jot down important information that you might need later, but this can result in a large number of Notes being stored on your device. It can also be very helpful when you use the Spotlight Search feature on your iPhone.

Step 1: Touch the Notes icon.

Step 2: Select the note that you want to delete.

Step 3: Touch the trash can icon at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4: Touch the Delete Note button.

If you have a lot of important files that you want to back up, or if you are running out of space on your computer hard drive, then look into getting a portable hard drive. They are easy to set up and affordable, and make for one of the easiest ways to store a large amount of files.